A prayerful rural home

Snipes never failed to say a blessing before eating meals that often included snap beans, corn bread, potatoes, and cabbage. He learned religion as a boy, praying every night before bed and attending a Methodist church with his grandparents. He describes an intense worship experience, an "old time religion" that is dying out. As he reflects on his Christian values, he describes the arrival of a car in his isolated farm community.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with John W. Snipes, September 20, 1976. Interview H-0098-1. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

BRENT GLASS:

What might be a typical dinner or supper for you?

JOHN W. SNIPES:

Oh, it'd take a peck of snap beans and two pones of corn
bread. It'd take a gallon of ice potatoes, and maybe a pot of
cabbage or turnips or turnip greens.

BRENT GLASS:

How many times a week would you have meat?

JOHN W. SNIPES:

We didn't have much. We didn't have none except
what we raised. Now sometimes we'd have ham for breakfast, as
long as there was ham. We'd kill about four hogs or three
hogs, and maybe we'd have five or six hams. But we
didn't start cutting those hams 'til long up in
the spring when they took the meat up, which
started long about Easter or something like that. We'd eat on
the shoulders first and let the hams season a little more. Shoulder meat
weren't too bad fresh, I mean before it got too rank and old.
But we'd keep them hams. We'd put molasses and
black pepper on them hams as flavor to them, and we'd keep
them on up until the summer and fall when we didn't have no
vegetables maybe, until hog killing time.

BRENT GLASS:

Would there be a prayer at dinner time?

JOHN W. SNIPES:

We'd never eat a meal without my father saying a blessing. I
believe if you'll always say a blessing and ask a blessing
from God you'll always have something on the table. And we
don't miss a meal; I've never missed a meal
without giving thanks to God.

BRENT GLASS:

Now that sort of reminds me that I didn't really ask you about
going to church when you were a small boy. Who would you go to church
with? Or would you go to church?

JOHN W. SNIPES:

We was raised to go to church from the time we was eighteen months old.
Momma carried us in her arms 'til we got on up like little
stair steps. Manns Chapel was right there in sight of where we was
raised, just six-seven hundred yards.
[interruption]

BRENT GLASS:

We're going to talk for another fifteen minutes or so, and
then we'll call it for today. So your parents took you up to
Manns Chapel?

JOHN W. SNIPES:

Yes sir. My father a lot of the time was superintendent of the Sunday
school. And I was raised in the old-timey Methodist shouting method.

BRENT GLASS:

What do you mean by that?

JOHN W. SNIPES:

Well, they had these old revivals or what we used to call
protracted meetings. And I was raised in a Christian home,
of which I'm mighty proud. We'd hitch a two-horse
wagon. My father and mother would sit on a spring seat (it was a little
better seat than just a plank acros there), and they put wheat straw in
the wagon bed. And they'd stack us young'uns in
that wagon bed, and then maybe about a crackerbox full of three or four
chickens and cakes and pies. And we'd go to those. When they
started on Sunday they lasted through the week, maybe 'til
the next Sunday. We was raised in an old-fashioned shouting Methodist.
And as the revival got on over into the middle of the week, when the
preacher got to sort of stepping on their toes everybody in there,
almost, started shouting. I was talking about it last night.
They've got away from that.

BRENT GLASS:

Now what do you mean by that? I mean, stepping on people's
toes?

JOHN W. SNIPES:

Well, telling them about their sins, just laying it on the line. Maybe
the preacher'd get right smart hot and lay it on the line to
them. And they'd get up and get to shouting when they give
the invitation at the altar call and all such as that. Well, they
didn't think, I reckon, little bitty old barefoot
boys…. My Daddy put me on the front seat with him, and
I'd wear little old knee pants and I was barefooted,
barelegged and barefooted. I went barefoot; didn't have no
shoes in the summer. I'd stub my toe and there'd
be sore toes. Well, the preacher might have though I was sitting there
on the front seat scaring the gnats off of my sores on my toes. I was
shooing the gnats off of them and the flies, but I was listening to
everything he said. I was taking it all in, but he might not have
thought so. I knew what he was talking about. We had as good a Christian
people in Manns Chapel old church as… well, I just think that
they were tops, just out of this world. We run about eighty
or ninety to a hundred average attendance. And I
didn't think that church would ever fall down and go down
low. Recently it's got down to four members—four
attendance, not members. I think the superintendent told me they have
four one Sunday or two, and maybe then seven. Maybe one's
parents would come with them or something, but running from four to
seven.

BRENT GLASS:

Was this a Baptist church or Methodist?

JOHN W. SNIPES:

Methodist church.

BRENT GLASS:

Oh that's right, shouting Methodist.

JOHN W. SNIPES:

Manns Chapel.

BRENT GLASS:

Well, did you ever get swept up in the revivals and start shouting?

JOHN W. SNIPES:

I never shouted, but I felt like it many a time, when I was little even.
I'd sit mighty still. I'd be sitting there maybe
shooing the gnats off of my sore toe, but I knowed everything that was
going on. I might not seem to have been attentive, but I knowed what he
was saying and knowed what it meant. But them were great days back then.
I think the country has got away from the old-time religion.
That's what they lived on then, was the old-time religion.
Now I was listening to a program last night with Pat Boone and Billy
Graham and them. It come on last night. I come in from church and just
turned it on and got the end of it; didn't get all of the
program. But I think that there's a turning back.
We've had about four or five years of the biggest increase in
crime rate that the world has ever known. But I think the trend will
switch back; I think the pendulum will switch back, because I think
people are going back to the church and going back to God. They swung
away from that. Human life now, the way most of the criminals feel about
it, is no more than an animal or a rabbit or
something. But crime has got too high in the United States. I think that
the trend is going to turn back to God; I hope they do.

BRENT GLASS:

Well, now who would you give credit to for teaching you right from
wrong?

JOHN W. SNIPES:

I think it was a principle that my mother and father…. I loved
my grandmother better than anything on earth. She'd make me
squat down every night; I never did go to bed without saying my little
bednight prayer. "Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord
my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul
to take. Amen." And I'd scoot into bed, jump into
bed just as far in the bed as I could get.
[Laughter]
I think that it was the life that they led. They were Christian
people. My grandmother, my father and mother, I'm proud to
say, awful proud to say that they were Christian people.

BRENT GLASS:

And they taught you?

JOHN W. SNIPES:

The principle, the philosophy of life was to love everybody, to be kind
to everybody and treat everybody right. Of course there were mean people
back then—not too much, weren't too much. They
didn't have the communication then, the way of traveling and
going about from place to place. See, I was born before the automobile
was, and I was born before the airplane was. The airplane down at Kitty
Hawk weren't 'til 1903. I remember the first
automobile. Mr. Bruce Strowd's father, who used to live just
above us, adjoining plantation, and then his father moved to Chapel Hill
(well, his grandfather lived there too)…. Bruce Strowd at
Chapel Hill Strowd Motor Company, Bruce was just a young boy, and they
took an old gasoline engine and took some old wheels. We lived right on
the side of a little sandy dirt road, public road. Bruce took this
gasoline engine, and it was an old type of engine with alternate
stroke. It would hit "pow, pow, pow,
choo, choo, choo; pow, pow, pow, choo, choo, choo."
It'd skip; you've heard them, and you know what
I'm trying to say. Well, we was plowing out there a little,
(I just could reach the plow handle; I believe it was in 1907 or
'08) and we heard this fuss coming down the road. It just
scared the mule to death. And I run around there and got him by the
bridle, trying to hold to him 'til that thing passed. And
Bruce Strowd come in sitting on a goods box, come right by the house in
a little four wheel contraption, him and Mr. Seaton Smith of Chapel Hill
(that's my wife Lessie's uncle.)
[Laughter]
That's the first automobile that was ever in Chatham
County. It had a gasoline motor, but it was a woodsaw motor. And he had
it geared so it would propel, you know, and it would go along about five
miles an hour. And it went "chooka, chooka, chooka, pow, pow,
pow, pow." And then there was a streak of smoke; he had a
smokestack, and it'd fly in there. And that just scared the
old mule to death.
[Laughter]
The greatest thing we'd ever seen in all our lives.
I believe it was about 1908; I was about six or seven or eight years
old.